I have followed on this topic on this list and on other places and I may say I am very concernd over the issue. I believe Craig has summed up the current situation well. A couple of further points, one of the biggest complaints over the development of systemd is the attitude of the main developers, ie them taking little notice of anyone else. The second point is the apparent helter-skelter expansion of facilties in a single system component. The more complex a single item of software becomes the far more difficult it becomes to maintain it bug free. The future of linux with systemd does not bear thinking about. The supporters of systemd do not really make me feel any better, as there is little discussion going on. The pro argument apparently being, its good, the debian developers like it so there. This sort of pro argument goes no where. What is debian going to do if and when the systemd developers take no notice of any changes they propose and this appears likely. Website http://boycottsystemd.org/ may be of interest. Its very likely I have installed my last up date of Debian. I will carry one with the current stable while I assess what alternatives are around. Looks to be three options so far... Gentoo Slackware I have used both of these, the third option in the medium term is to stick with Debian 7.x but gradually update system compnents by building them myself. Note, I already do this to some extent, usually running a later version of the kernel, Xorg and Mesa. This of course does muck up the package managment but the does not bother me much. I could of course make my own deb packages, this __may__ make it easier in the long run. Lindsay Linux since kernel 0.96d, who would have predicted it would end this way? :-(